Puerto Maldonado

The capital and commercial nexus of the department of Madre de Dios is the small city of Puerto Maldonado.  Founded in the time of the rubber boom around the turn of the century by the legendary tycoon Fitzcarrald, Puerto remained little more than a frontier outpost in an isolated region until gold and mahogany interests brought succeeding waves of immigrants from the Andean highlands.  In the last ten years, the city has more than doubled to a population nearing 40,000.  This figure can be somewhat deceptive however, as many of the city’s residents spend some or most of their time in the forests harvesting lumber or brazil nuts, working subsistence farmlands, or filtering gold dust from the mud along the riverbanks.

Puerto Maldonado is strategically important as both the place of convergence of the Tambopata and Madre de Dios Rivers and as the one place where all of the Madre de Dios region’s 110,000 inhabitants inevitably converge to buy supplies and sell goods.  Camino Verde works with several of the city’s plant nurseries to supply some of our projects and ongoing programs.